Profiling the Heritage Tourism Translator

We begin this chapter with a short discussion marking out "heritage tourism" as a distinct form of tourism, and one which is destined to develop the most in the near future. We argue that the distinctiveness of heritage tourism requires an equally particular set of skills when translating, which we divide into two parts. The first part focuses on the distinguishing purposes of heritage tourism. These all require mediation or interpretation between the heritage site and the visitors, whether through actual interpreter-guides or through multimedial support. The argument is that the heritage tourism translator will need similar interpreting-mediational competencies to create an effective translation for the new outsider visitor. The competency set outlined is based initially on a well-known typology of museum-translation functions. The second part focuses on multisemiotics, not only as a distinguishing feature of heritage tourism communication, but as a transversal competence that a heritage tourism translator needs to master to satisfy each of the heritage tourism functions outlined. This transversal competence is first discussed in terms of the theory of multisemiotic interaction in translation, focusing in particular on materiality, modal affordances and content reshaping, and will be illustrated with practical examples involving purely visual, audio and audiovisual modalities.